Google unveils Tensor Processing Unit hardware

Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) fits in a hard-drive slot of a server and is claimed to accelerate TensorFlow applications equivalent to skipping three generations of Moore’s Law. Advertising giant Google has unveiled a custom processor developed to speed up its TensorFlow machine learning platform: the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU.Since its public release back in November, there has been considerable interest in using Google’s machine learning platform for a variety of tasks – not least inside Google itself. The company uses the platform for everything from natural-language processing to image recognition, and now it has a way to make its operation considerably faster: the Tensor Processing Unit.’We started a stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine…